Monorail Cleanup

[Djohaal]

A minor project I started.
I find the monorail sprites in simutrans a bit too cluttered so I edited them to remove the diagonal struts (a bit unreallistic, but yeah) on the track segment sections, and fixed transparent pixel strips in the support struts which caused the game's downsampler to get fudgy at some spots. So far here's the result:

[Sarlock]

Nice improvement... I wonder, though... does anyone ever even use these in their games?

[Djohaal]

I really like them because their rails aren't as visually obtrusive in an urban environment unlike raised railroads and such. I'd really like to see monorails getting some love. Another thing I did in my edit is to make both the ground and raised monorail have the same speed limit. It gets unprofitable if the raised rail has a limit of 70km and the avg speed of most cars is 100.

[Sarlock]

I'd love to see them converted to the more commonly seen monorail design personally, with a mono-rail track suspended by a single pillar in the middle like most monorail designs (as opposed to the schwebebahn suspended style):



Part of my issue with them as they exist is that the cars are drawn in front of the support pillars due to the track being drawn in behind the moving train.  With a monorail track design the cars would be on top and the problem wouldn't exist.

This would require a lot of drawing, however.

[DirrrtyDirk]

Frontimages are now availabe for ways, so it should be possible to have the pillars shown correctly behind the trains as well.

A couple of years ago, I painted such "traditional" monorail tracks (the ALWEG system) in 128 size for my own project, but it was never my intention to replace the current pak128 "Schwebebahn" with it. And I'm not going to release any addons for Simutrans any more in the current situation.

(Still helping and fixing things in pak128 though, so don't worry)

[Combuijs]

Nice improvement... I wonder, though... does anyone ever even use these in their games?

Yup, I've converted them for my own pak64, and I use it as one of the four alternatives for city road traffic (being underground, overground (elevated track), tram and monorail (usually elevated).

[greenling]

Hello Sarlock
The Monorail gives as modell in the pak128.japan and as Addon on http://japanese.simutrans.com .

[Djohaal]

I could work with translating the monorail from pak128.japan into pak128 if the pak.japan authors allow it, however I think i'd add it as a maglev way type to not override the Schwebebahn as I'm quite fond of it too. Given maglevs aren't used by the game up to the SNFOS add-ons in the 2000's it'd be a good menu to use.

[Sarlock]

I think we'd still like to eventually offer a full maglev set for pak128 in the future.  Perhaps narrow gauge railway?  The regular gauge railroads are so well developed in pak128 we might be able to just skip ever wanting to do narrow gauge.

[Djohaal]

We don't have authorization to use gauthier's maglevs as integral part of pak128 or incorporation is pending content cleanup?
(also I'm at #simutrans at quakenet atm if you wanna chat)

[greenling]

I think that the useing of narrow gauge for the maglev set not so good it.

[Fabio]

Narrow gauge will be needed and useful with half slopes as regular gauge tracks will be limited to these, as it is in real world with railways needing lesser gradients and narrow gauge used in mountain itineraries.